My experience might not match others but honestly I would recommend avoiding this trap. It’s just compromise and disappointment all the way up. Then you’ll be blamed for anything that goes wrong despite only 15% of your plan being accepted by executives. If the company culture is different and fosters leadership instead of stifling it then maybe it could work. At the end of the day you’re probably still going to be making someone else’s dreams come true until you start your own company.

Been a team lead in title at my company (small software company, out of the start up phase, but was a startup when I joined)) for over a decade. Only figured out how to be a leader in reality over the last 5ish years.

Do you want the title of team lead, or to actually be a leader on your team? Those are often two different things.

Getting the title depends a lot on the politics of your employer. A good place will promote based on merit, others won’t.

Being an actual leader is actually a lot more straightforward: serve the team. Be the driving force behind improving their work lives. That means communicating with them regularly both about what they are finding difficult (and then being a driver in finding a solution) and celebrating them when things go well. It means being a champion for the good ideas others have. It also means asking for help from the team when it’s needed; stay humble.

Through this constant communication a couple of things should start to happen:

• you’ll be able to piece things (solutions, product improvements, bug fixes, etc) more quickly, because your domain and contextual knowledge will be greater than those not serving the team.
• other team members will start coming to you for things, people will naturally gravitate toward those that have proven to be helpful
• the team will start outputting higher quality product
• life for the team will get more enjoyable

Do all that and people will start naturally looking to you.

Do good work, be interested and show interest, and be in a recipiable environment.

If your current environment is overbearing with power politics you don’t succeed in and you want change you’ll probably have to change environments.

If you want impact consider whether smaller companies and teams would be beneficial. You may be able to fill your desires of impact and control even without becoming a formal lead role. Or become one implicitly or naturally quicker in smaller less formal and structured environments.

You can also look for job offerings for those kinds of roles specifically. No need to seek out a climb in house when you can find more direct routes.

You don’t have to be the first person. I joined a startup a long time ago as a regular engineer and they made me team lead within a year. Startups generally move a bit faster and a lot more chaotically. Especially when they’re growing fast. You do have to be good but having a vision also helps.

I stuck with them through acquisitions etc. and everything slowed down a lot. Should have gotten out of the large corporation life earlier tbh.

I think this really depends on the company’s culture and size. From my experience, having only worked in smaller teams, I’d say trying to partake in management duties proactively has probably been most successful for colleagues who wanted to lead.

So when your boss or supervisor has a meeting about your product, ask if you can join. If you have a well thought-out idea on how to improve things, like introducing better processes, fixing recurring issues, introducing better tools or something like that, talk about it. Being visible as someone who genuinely cares about the success of your team, product and company is, in my experience, probably the most important thing.

Just make sure this is actually what you want. Depending on the company, you might end up doing very little programming and lots of spreadsheets and misery instead. Find out what’s keeping your current team lead busy and ask yourself if that’s really what you want to do.